Yesterday morning we were excited that the first peregrine egg hatched at Pitt and looked forward to a second hatching later in the day.

At around 2:15pm the second egg hatched. Hope manipulated it, killed it, and fed it to the first chick.

This is not normal peregrine behavior.

Viewers were shocked and bewildered.  Many of you had questions but I was out of cell range for most of the day, unaware that it happened.

I have never seen this behavior before and don’t know why it occurred.  Here’s what we do know: Peregrines’ lives are very different from ours. Using our human yardstick to understand them — anthropomorphizing — really leads us astray.

I asked Art McMorris, the PA Game Commission’s Peregrine Coordinator, who viewed the archived footage and said the chick was alive but might not have been normal.  In all his years of dealing with peregrines, Art has never seen this before either.

Hope’s behavior was so unusual that there is no information on it.  Many of you speculated about it and asked “Is this why she did it?”  In almost every case my answer is “I don’t know.”

A line from The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot comes to mind: “But there was no information, and so we continued.”   The rest of the poem applies, too.

And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different …
— excerpt from The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

We are learning a lot this year about unusual peregrine behavior.

And a reminder: If watching the nestcam upsets you, turn it off. Give yourself a rest. I do.

(photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ. of Pittsburgh)

Happy news at the Cathedral of Learning peregrine nest.  The first chick has hatched!    Welcome to the world, “C1.”

This morning at 6:18 am Hope was restless and pulled one of the eggs away from the other three.  In this photo you can see that the egg is cracked.  The chick was about to hatch.

Soon Hope moved the egg back to the clutch …

… and at 6:42am she called to Terzo, “Come see what’s happening.”

Terzo arrived at 6:55am (top photo) to see the chick nestled in the half shell.

Hope left to have breakfast and Terzo settled on the chick and eggs to keep them warm.

By 7:27am Terzo showed the chick completely out of the shell.  Notice the two halves of empty shell.

Welcome to the world, “C1”!    We hope we’ll see more “C’s” hatching soon.  (See this blog post about nestling names.)

UPDATE AT 4:00PM: I’m sorry that I’ve been out of cell range for the past 5 hours. At around 2:15pm the second egg hatched, Hope killed it and fed it to the first chick. I have never seen this behavior before and do not know enough yet to speculate on why this happened. I’ll publish more news when I have it.

(photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ. of Pittsburgh)

Yesterday afternoon — Saturday April 23 — an adult female intruder visited the Pitt peregrines’ nest while Terzo was incubating the eggs at 4:00pm.

Terzo took one look at her and left (above).

The mystery lady stayed for less than a minute but managed to show the color of her bands: pinkish USFW band (right leg) and Black/Red on her left leg.

Obviously she’s a different bird than the one that visited April 8th.  That one was an unbanded juvenile.  This one is an adult and has bands that may be from Ohio.

But it doesn’t matter who she is as long as she doesn’t stay.  Hope chased her away and was back at the nest at 6:20pm looking just fine.

It all happened so quickly that we wouldn’t have noticed if Janet Luzell hadn’t mentioned it in a comment on my blog.

Thank you, Janet, for your sharp eyes!

(photos from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh)

p.s. I am rarely in Facebook so if you want to reach me the quickest way is to leave a comment on my blog.  Every comment sends me an email.

Perhaps we shouldn’t count our peregrines before they hatch but the chicks at the Hays bald eagle nest and Cornell’s red-tailed hawk nest made me think about nestling names.

When we see birds on camera we want them to have names.

Bald eagle chicks are named with the nest letter + a number that keeps increasing year after year.  At the Hays nest the names are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, etc.

At Cornell’s red-tailed hawk nest, Big Red and Ezra’s chicks are named with a letter that changes every year + a number.  The nest is now up to the letter G so the first two chicks were named G1 and G2 and together they’re called “the G’s.”

In the past we didn’t name peregrine nestlings until Banding Day but that led to misunderstandings and confusion so here’s the plan — similar to the bald eagle protocol.

The Cathedral of Learning nestlings will named with a nest letter that doesn’t change (C for Cathedral of Learning) + a number.  If we’d started this in 2009 the four nestlings above would be C1, C2, C3, C4.

Good luck figuring out who’s who!  Peregrine eggs all hatch within 24+ hours so the nestlings are the same size for a long time.  This only changes when the females become noticeably larger that the males. Males are 1/3 smaller.

When will the eggs hatch at Pitt?  I believe that real incubation did not begin until April 3 or 4.  Wild peregrines hatch their eggs in about 33 days.  (Incubator-raised eggs hatch sooner because of constant temperature without interruptions.)   So my prediction for Hatch Day at Pitt is approximately May 6.  …But I might be wrong…

Why isn’t the hatch date sooner?  After E2 died, Hope spent a long time away from the nest searching for a mate.  If she had heated the first three eggs to incubation temperature and then left them, her long absence would cause those embryos to fail.  At this point I believe she merely protected the three eggs until all four began incubation in early April.

(photos from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh, May 2009)

This morning Terzo kept four eggs warm at the Cathedral of Learning peregrine nest while Hope left to eat breakfast.

Here he is showing off the sharp contrast between his gray back and his black head and wing tips.  Hope’s feathers do not contrast as much.

Does this mean incubation has begun?  Terzo’s action is a good indication that this may be the first day of incubation, but the pair’s activities will tell the tale.  We’ll know for sure when they’re on the eggs nearly 24×7.

How long until the eggs hatch?

Incubation lasts about 33 days.  If today is the first day of incubation, watch for hatching around May 6.  (Note that hatch date predictions are never exact!)

(photo from the National Aviary snapshot camera at Univ of Pittsburgh)